A Super Easy Way to Write Special Characters Using The F8 Key

Writing special characters from your keyboard isn’t a very easy job – you have to remember the Alt chart for special symbols and use the corresponding keyboard combination to insert the special character or symbol within your document.

Then there is Typeit – a useful website which lets you type special characters and symbols of major international languages from a web interface. The only downside of Typeit is that you have to recursively copy paste the special characters from browser and paste it in the document. And if you are working offline, you need a simple way to add special characters without having to remember the Alt chart or look up any PDF cheat sheet.

Enter AX – a free utility (Windows only) which lets you insert special characters of any language using just the F8 key of your keyboard. The program needs no installation, just run the executable and use the F8 key, whenever you need to insert a special character in a Word document, presentation, spreadsheet or blog post.

The usage is simple enough. When you hit the F8 key, the program turns the normal character placed just to the left of mouse character into a special character or symbol. Following is an example.

Let’s say you want to type Geôrges Mêlié (the name of a french film maker) which contains 3 symbols. Typing “Geo” and hitting the F8 key changes the letters to “Geô”, so the entire keyboard combination becomes : Geo[f8]rges[Space]Me[F8]lie[F8]. How Simple !

There are more rules and sets which you can use and configure. All in all, this is the most easiest way to deal with Special characters without having to memorize anything. Foreign language students who have to deal with a lot of author names, mathematical symbols or other Non english characters will find this freeware immensely useful.